The Arnolfini double portrait: a simple solution

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Margaret L. Koster

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English and English-influenced tomb slabs and brasses, for example, show a married couple, both recumbent in the process of taking the matrimonial oath, occasionally in such a manner that the head of the lady reposes on a pillow while that of her husband does not ... (61)

Panofsky does not compare the tomb brass to the painting by Van Eyck, despite the clear formal relationship. In fact, the hands of husband and wife were often linked in English funerary monuments. (62) Needless to say, a tomb marker was not a marriage document: like Van Eyck's Double portrait, such an image merely referred to matrimony as a key moment in the life of those depicted.

However, Panofsky does link an epitaph in Tournai Cathedral of about 1438 (Fig. 14) with Van Eyck's Virgin of Canon van der Paele (Fig. 13). (63) Although it is often described as an altarpiece, this painting is far more likely to have served as an epitaph--a potential function of this and other pictures by Van Eyck that needs further study. As in the Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (Fig. 15), to which one might compare another contemporary epitaph (Fig. 16), and--I would argue--the Double portrait, here too the artist allows us to behold the earthly presence of a living individual together with an apparition that appears to that individual in his mind's eye, as if were. Many epitaphs made at this time in the Netherlands have the same fundamental structure. They show what the depicted person wishes he could see tangibly before him, but they also reveal the fact that it is only an illusion.

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Seen in these terms, Van Eyck's Double portrait climaxes in the vision of the deceased lady. It is completely orchestrated around that basic idea, from the difference in the treatment of light--she is bathed in a kind of ethereal whiteness, while he stands in comparative shadow--to the inventory of objects that surround the two.

Panofsky argued that the dog in the foreground at the lady's feet, 'seen on so many tombs of ladies, was an accepted emblem of marital faith', while Hall and Campbell, in contrast, each found the Arnolfini dog to be devoid of symbolic significance. (64) Yet the dog is surely another link to death imagery. In ancient funerary monuments and medieval tomb effigies, of which the tomb of Margaret of Austria (Fig. 21)--the owner of the Double portrait--is a characteristic example, such dogs served to express 'the mutual affection of husband and wife in a happy marriage.' (65) A case in point is the Count and Countess of Henneberg Tomb by Peter Vischer (Fig. 20). The meaning of the dog may or may not be linked to fidelity--the real point here is that a common type of female tomb effigy in this period includes a full-length portrait of the deceased with a small dog at her feet. It may be significant that a dog appears in many effigies au vif--as in life--but not in effigies en transi. Rather than being a sign of fidelity, perhaps the dog's role is to accompany the dead in eternity, like the angels that also sometimes appear with tomb effigies (for instance, on the tomb of Philip the Bold at the Chartreuse de Champmol). (66)